In the process of looking at the record of the Association's accomplishments over the past ten years, I came across some of the early records of the negotiations which brought the Association into existence, and I thought it might be of interest if I were to compare what has been done to what was envisaged as the task of the Association when the idea was first suggested. The origins of the Association go back to a seminar on Africa which met privately and informally in New York in 1954. Out of this group a plan was put forth for the formation of an African Institute, and an organizing committee, consisting of William A. Hance, Jean Comhaire, Alan Pifer, and Nicolaas Pansegrouer, was constituted to take care of the practical steps toward organizing such an institute. The proposed activities of the Institute included the assembly of documents and periodicals referring to Africa, the provision of scholarly and technical information and consultative services to educational, religious, governmental, and business groups, and the facilitation of visits to Africa for study and observation. Names suggested for the new body were the North American Institute of African Studies and the American Institute of African Studies. Not unsurprisingly, much of the discussion at this time, as now, centered about financing the new Institute.

Singularly lacking in the current discussion of concepts as the appropriate basis for the new social studies curriculum are concepts which are comparative in nature. For example, the Social Studies Curriculum Center at Syracuse University identified eighteen substantive concepts that “appear to be appropriate for elementary and secondary programs in social studies.” Only one concept -- “comparative advantage” -- of these eighteen substantive concepts, however, even faintly implies a comparison. Moreover, comparative advantage is described in terms of bargaining and conflict, not in distinctive social realities. A different group of concepts was identified by the Wisconsin Social Studies Committee. The Committee attempted to identify several basic conceptual ideas that underlie the central elements of history and each of the social sciences in order “to help our young people extract meaning and bring order from the sea of facts which may otherwise inundate them.” But the concepts identified by the Wisconsin Social Studies Committee are vague and do not imply comparison of data or interpretations. The major concept identified for history, for example, is “Change is inevitable.” But what does the concept mean? Does the concept help the student in extracting meaning and bringing order to a sea of facts? More important, does the concept exclude the possibility of constants in history which may be the truth of the matter for some societies? Indeed, the concept, as stated, encourages convergent rather than divergent thinking by the student. Like a Mondrian painting, the reality depicted may be impressive but no one is quite sure what it all means.

This is the second in a series of progress reports on African archaeology in the United States. These reports are being produced at the request of the Archaeology Committee of the African Studies Association as a means of indicating the nature and extent of current North American participation in this aspect of African research.

William Y. Adams of the University of Kentucky is leading an archaeological expedition to excavate the medieval Nubian village site of Kulubnarti in the Republic of the Sudan. The object of the expedition is to try to discover evidence of Islamization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries -- a historical problem which received almost no attention during the recent High Dam salvage campaign in Nubia. Work will be carried on from January to May 1969 under the direction of Dr. and Mrs. Adams with four student assistants and a labor force of 125. The expedition is sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky, under a grant from the National Science Foundation.

This article is a supplement to a previous article on the same subject published in the African Studies Bulletin. Before I list further citations omitted from Materials for West African History in the Archives of Belgium and Holland, I will discuss, in some detail, the nature of the archival material deposited in the Algemeen Rijksarchief, The Hague. I will attempt to enhance the brief discussions of Miss Carson while avoiding repetition of statements which seem clear and/or are adequately discussed in her book.

The General State Archives, The Hague, includes two major collections of interest to the West African historian: the Archives of the West India Companies and the Archives of the Netherlands Settlements on the Guinea Coast. Initially, one must realize that most of the seventeenth-century papers of both collections have been lost or destroyed, and that as a consequence there are many gaps among the existing manuscripts. For example, volume 81 (1658-1709) of the Archives of the Netherlands Settlements on the Guinea Coast includes only manuscripts for the following times: December 25, 1658-June 12, 1660; August, 1693; and October 12-December 31, 1709. Also, most of the seventeenth-century material is written in script, whereas the eighteenth-century manuscripts, with some exceptions, are in more conventional hand-writings.